GreenTeamTV is on the scene in Bend, Oregon with Cary Martinez, co-founder of Abacus GC, taking a tour through one of the homes in Newport District Modern House Project.  We wrote about Abacus GC’s five-house project previously, which is pursuing LEED certification.  The video shows the developer’s perspective of trying to build something to suit a lifestyle:  lighter footprint, less reliance on automobiles, and healthy, green living.  You’ll also see some cool products, such as PaperStone counters, Eco-Terr tiles, wheatboard cabinets, Design Within Reach lights, and Jenn Air Professional Series appliances. 

++Newport District Modern House Project

Although memories of elementary school for most of us may evoke images of stuffy classrooms, florescent lights, and playground bullies, students at Chartwell School located in Seaside, CA (near Monterey) are quite proud of their new school campus.  That’s because the USGBC recently gave them an A+ in green building.  In December, Chartwell students announced that they have the first complete educational campus to be awarded LEED Platinum, which makes them just about the greenest school campus in the country.  Congrats also to Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC for their LEED Platinum middle-school building.

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Existing buildings have tons of embodied energy and we can’t always go bulldozing them for brand-spanking new ones.  Lots of projects need to be rehabbed and renovated, but where do we go for best practices?  I like to follow other projects for ideas, such as this one that we recently featured:  World’s First LEED Platinum Home Remodel.  The guys behind this project, after going through a major renovation of a traditional home, posted a list of the Ten Most Critical Things to Do in a Green Remodel.  They make some excellent points based on true experience, so here it is:

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Discovery, aka "the number-one nonfiction media company" and recent purchaser of Treehugger, now has legit green digs.  LEED-EB stands for LEED Existing Buildings, but the certification standard has recently undergone a renovation to LEED Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance.  Up until now, the LEED-EB Platinum certification has been pretty rare, but we’ll see if that changes post-renovation.  The Clinton Library got a Platinum and so did the headquarters of both Armstrong and Adobe.  So, it looks like Discovery’s 540,000 sf building is in good company.  Here’s what they did to get the high distinction:

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Grand Rapids, Michigan is one of the greenest cities in the country, at least if you go by the number of LEED certified buildings it has.  A couple of years ago, Grand Rapids was #5 on a list of cities with the most LEED certified buildings, surpassing even cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC.  Grand Rapids also has embraced renewable energy for the city.  But Grand Rapids’ latest claim to green fame is that it is now the home to the first new construction LEED-certified art museum in the country. 

The building is a 125,000 sf structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of Workshop Hakomori Yantrasast (wHY Architects).  The Grand Rapids Art Museum opened just a few weeks prior to David Adjaye’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, which is also expecting a LEED Gold.

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